In his first novel to be translated into English, Shahriar Mandanipour sets out to write the story of young lovers struggling to consummate their prenuptial passion under the eyes of the Iranian morals police. They hang out nervously in Internet cafes, dark movie houses and on the jammed and smoggy streets of modern-day Tehran.

The clandestine courtship comes at a time when university students protest and vigilantes watch out for transgressing neighbors. A war with U.S. troops and suicide bombers rages in next-door Iraq.

Telling amorous tales in post-Islamic-revolution Iran is tricky, if not downright dangerous, but a fictional writer named Shahriar Mandanipour is up to the task. “I am an Iranian writer tired of writing dark and bitter stories, stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with predictable endings of death and destruction,” writes the alter ego of the real-life Mandanipour, a Harvard visiting scholar and former writing fellow at Brown.

But with love in his sights, the narrator must subject his writing to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, where a Dostoevsky-inspired man named Porfiry Petrovich scrutinizes novels and short stories — especially those of the impassioned persuasion — for erotic material, real or imagined. Heavily underlined pages don”t reach much of an audience.

And so the narrator writes around the details that characterize a budding relationship.

“In the love story I want to write, I will not run into any difficulties as long as in the opening sentences I depict the beauty of spring flowers, the fragrant breeze, and the brilliant sun in the blue sky,” he writes. When diverging from pastoral scenes, he draws a line through overt references to flirting, natural body functions, shapely body parts and sexual experience — all of which remain legible to the reader. Profanity and anti-regime and bibulous commentary get the strike-through, too. The censor is the narrator”s nemesis as much as he is also his muse.

The lovers in this meta-love story are Sara and Dara, their pseudonymous names more fiction (Iranian writers are “the most postmodern in the world,” the narrator notes).

They meet in a library. Sara is a student of Iranian literature at Tehran University, and Dara is a cinephile and one-time political prisoner who paints houses and “wants to think not of the seven thousand nymphs who could be waiting for him in heaven but of his one nymph here on earth” (the narrator doesn”t say if this passage ultimately sneaks past the gatekeepers). A wealthy suitor named Sinbad adds narrative tension.

As he tells his censor-wary story, the matchmaking narrator employs symbol, metaphor and plenty of heartache — obvious nods to Barthes and Borges that of course don”t go unnoticed by the narrator. American pop culture references — Danielle Steele, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, Linkin Park, “Titanic” and “Vertigo” — combined with a reverie-like prose summon Murakami. Hypothetical narratives and abrupt digressions lend humor and irony to what”s supposed to be a melancholy affair. More than midway through the novel, the narrator admits to killing off a central protagonist; it”s an accident.

Some readers may find “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” too cute with its abundance of wink-wink tricks. But like some stylishly innovative movies (“Brazil” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” leap to mind), the form is essential to the work”s overall meaning.

And as much as humor dominates the book, it quietly gets at something else — the omnipotence of tyranny. In the novel, censors scrub literature, magazines, movies of anything that may invoke love or lust. The idea of an Iranian love story is a sad oxymoron.

But some readers may wonder, what if pious people like illustrations of Snow White wearing hijab and Happy and the other dwarves in dishdasha? Who are we to judge? Reconciling differences in morality and religion is complicated, but Mandanipour takes an earnest stab at it. While we may know the author”s allegiances, he also seems to be arguing that we should at least write about those differences, as difficult as they are: “Perhaps I write stories to show that in life there are moments, emotions, and events that cannot be explained with words.”